One of the disadvantages of being out of college is your free MATLAB subscription goes away. As a result, I’m making the switch to Python. Besides consistently being off-by-one due to zero indexing, I like Python quite a bit. Getting a 4th order RK solver to work was about as intuitive as getting ode45 to work in MATLAB for the first time, although I did have to explicitly tell scipy to use RK4 instead of some other default methods.
The first thing I did was run a basic orbit sim using some ISS TLEs for initial conditions. The 3d plotting libraries are great, and look as good (if not better) than what I was used to in MATLAB.
Unfortunately I don’t have a spherical Earth model with the map overlay like I did in MATLAB. I’ll be scouring the internet for how to plot an Earth when I have some more downtime. The propagation seems reasonable enough though, and feeling comfortable with plugging in dynamics and plotting the resulting states is the important thing here. Any future projects I do will be in Python, and I think my next task will be re-creating some landing trajectory simulations with some terrain maps.
Roshan Radhakrishnan 
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